Senior Staff AI Software Engineer

ABOUT OPORTUN

Oportun (Nasdaq: OPRT) is a mission-driven fintech that puts its 2.0 million members' financial goals within reach. With intelligent borrowing, savings, and budgeting capabilities, Oportun empowers members with the confidence to build a better financial future. Since inception, Oportun has provided more than $16.6 billion in responsible and affordable credit, saved its members more than $2.4 billion in interest and fees, and helped its members save an average of more than $1,800 annually. Oportun has been certified as a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) since 2009.

WORKING AT OPORTUN

Working at Oportun means enjoying a differentiated experience of being part of a team that fosters a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture where we all feel a sense of belonging and are encouraged to share our perspectives. This inclusive culture is directly connected to our organization's performance and ability to fulfill our mission of delivering affordable credit to those left out of the financial mainstream. We celebrate and nurture our inclusive culture through our employee resource groups.

POSITION OVERVIEW

We are seeking a highly experienced and visionary Senior Staff AI Engineer to join our dynamic team and lead the design and implementation of cutting-edge AI solutions, including GenAI, RAG, and NLP-based systems. At Oportun, you will play a critical role in identifying business challenges and crafting scalable, production-ready AI applications that deliver measurable impact.

As a Senior Staff AI Engineer, you will drive the development of intelligent systems that span document understanding, conversational interfaces, recommendation engines, and cognitive automation. Working closely with data scientists, machine learning engineers, product managers, and engineering leaders, you will help establish best practices and a strategic roadmap for enterprise-wide AI adoption. Your expertise will guide the end-to-end lifecycle—from prototyping and experimentation to robust system integration and deployment.

We are looking for a hands-on, business-minded engineer who can not only design technically sound architectures but also propose and deliver AI-powered solutions to real-world problems across our organization.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Define and lead the AI applications strategy—designing scalable, production-grade systems leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and multi-modal AI for high-impact business use cases.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and engineering leaders to identify opportunities for AI integration across business domains such as customer service automation, document understanding, personalization, and internal tooling.
• Architect, prototype, and scale AI-driven applications by orchestrating LLMs, vector databases, embedding models, and prompt chaining frameworks.
• Establish best practices for prompt engineering, system prompts, fine-tuning strategies, evaluation frameworks, and safety alignment.
• Design and deploy robust RAG pipelines integrated with structured and unstructured data sources using tools like LangChain, Haystack, or custom frameworks, leveraging vector stores such as ChromaDB for semantic retrieval.
• Champion a developer-friendly AI platform architecture, focusing on modularity, reproducibility, governance, and compliance.
• Integrate MLOps and AIOps principles for AI applications, ensuring observability, explainability, and responsible AI practices.
• Mentor engineers across disciplines on effective LLM usage, GenAI techniques, prompt design, and evaluation.
• Stay abreast of industry developments in GenAI, agentic systems, tool use/function calling, and multi-agent orchestration—and bring in cutting-edge innovations where feasible.

REQUIREMENTS

• 15+ years of experience in software, ML, or AI engineering; with at least 3+ years working directly on LLMs or AI applications.
• Strong experience with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere), open-source models (e.g., LLaMA, Mistral, Mixtral), and deployment stacks.
• Experience with prompt engineering, prompt templates, system message design, and evaluation/testing strategies for LLM behavior.
• Deep knowledge of retrieval pipelines, vector databases (e.g., ChromaDB, Pinecone, FAISS, Weaviate), and embedding strategies.
• Hands-on experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar AI orchestration frameworks.
• Expertise in building scalable APIs and AI application backends using Python, FastAPI, or Node.js.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure) and deployment of AI apps using Docker, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies.
• Familiarity with AI safety, ethics, and responsible AI principles in real-world deployments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex AI capabilities into business impact.
• Thorough comprehension of software engineering principles, version control (Git), and collaborative development workflows.
• Track record of successfully integrating DevOps practices, continuous integration, and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Exceptional communication aptitude, capable of fostering effective collaboration across diverse teams and stakeholders.

If you are passionate about using your technical &AI expertise to drive social impact and financial inclusion, we invite you to join us in our mission at Oportun. Apply now to become a part of our dynamic team and make a difference in the lives of millions.

#LI-REMOTE

#LI-GK1

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and consider all qualified applicants for employment opportunities without regard to race, age, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other category protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate.

California applicants can find a copy of Oportun's CCPA Notice here:  https://oportun.com/privacy/california-privacy-notice/.

We will never request personal identifiable information (bank, credit card, etc.) before you are hired. We do not charge you for pre-employment fees such as background checks, training, or equipment. If you think you have been a victim of fraud by someone posing as us, please report your experience to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).